High-Tech audio One of our lead actors is moving out of the Bay Area, so even though our edit isn't quite finished, we had to re-record his dialogue. We replace virtually every sound and word in all of our productions. This technique allows us to move more quickly during location work because we don't have to wait for that fire engine ten blocks away to go away, and we don't have to worry about accidentally getting the microphone in the shot.



So, here's my high-tech setup for recording the actor's voice. It's rigged from light stands and some fabric from one of the characters' costume. Despite the improvised gear, the recording was great.

One of the reasons I love making movies is the need to figure out solutions to unexpected challenges.


-- Post From My iPhone
  ¶ 1:46 PM 1 Comments

  New Toy
I went to MacWorld in January here in San Francisco, and stopped by the Kensington booth where they were showing off their new "SlimBlade" trackball. I'm a big trackball fan, and have been for years, ever since I realized how much more accurate they could be when making selections in Photoshop. No more "the cursor moves when I click" stuff. The Kensington folks were taking names of folks who wanted to try out the SlimBlade Trackball, so I signed up. They asked all sorts of questions about what I like to do with my trackballs. I'll resist the temptation to make a juvenile joke here....

I use trackballs both at work and at home, and the Kensington folks seemed most interested in the fact that I use them on all my home computers, for photo editing, video work, 3D stuff, and so on. A week or so ago, they contacted me and said I'd been selected to participate in their promotional project, and that they'd be sending me a SlimBlade to try out. All they asked in return was that I'd post images of me using it, what my setup is, and eventually to tell how I liked using it.

So, here's the first post about it. Since we're working in post production on Inspector Hieronymus, I'm doing a lot of cursor controlling, which seemed like a great way to try it out. In the photo you can see me at work with our MacPro, editing Scene H (a lovely scene filled with drama and pathos). The SlimBlade is next to my Wacom Tablet. The USB Powered Robotic Owl sits perched atop the Blu-Ray Burner Drive, advising me on edit decisions. On the screen is Adobe Premiere Pro, CS4, with the Scene H sequence open. If you look closely, you can see an exclusive, first look at the mysterious pillars of Scene H!

My first impressions are this:

• The SlimBlade looks really cool; I really dig the shiney, sheeny ball, and the smooth shape of the base is nice, too.
• In addition to the usual trackball method of moving the cursor around, you can rotate the ball like a knob to scroll. It's like a scroll wheel, but different.
• There are four buttons in the base. The left and right click buttons are where I tend to rest the heel of my hand, so I tend to click them accidentally. The other two buttons (the "Medium Mode" and the "View Mode" buttons) are where my instincts tell me the left and right click buttons should be. I haven't played with the settings for the SlimBlade to see if I can re-assign the buttons (though I did note that it doesn't put a new pane in my system preferences, but rather a new icon in the upper right of my computer, which is a little annoying). I need to play with the settings to see if I can assign the buttons myself.
  

Give me a while working with this device and I'll let you all know what I think about it....

In the meantime, I'm off to create some otherworldly energy fields for the movie.  ¶ 12:36 PM 0 Comments

  No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition Ah, the joys of renting. So one Wednesday during production, Dex and I arrived home from the day jobs to discover a notice from the property management company, informing us that they would be dropping by on Friday to inspect the premises.

Of course, many people in San Francisco have to clean up a bit before the landlord drops by. There's that pot stash that probably shouldn't be sitting on the kitchen counter, or those whips and chains that are perhaps better stored under the bed than over it, or that collection of HIV medications that are none of the landlord's damn business, and so on. Everybody has something in their abode that they'd rather not share with people with the power to evict.

For Dex and I, that was the Satanic Death Pit.

We'd built the Satanic Death Pit for the movie, of course, in the space occupied by our bed before we moved it to the kitchen. The Satanic Death Pit contained five faux granite pillars, one scarlet altar, various burgundy tapestries and one blood-inscribed stone pentagram, all of which had to be hidden from the prying eyes of the landlords within 48 hours, to say nothing of many lights, stands and tripods scattered throughout the apartment. Oh, and several sheets of 4' by 8' styrofoam, standing by in case of a set emergency.

The faux granite pillars presented the greatest challenge: They were too big to hide (say) under the bed, too tall to fit in the narrow unoccupied space in the attic, and too strange to just leave casually in the corner of a room. In the end, we decided the least weird thing to do was to stack the pillars horizontally, turning them into a tacky gay headboard, replete with draping burgundy fabric. We then had an object large enough to hide the styrofoam sheets behind. The light stands and tripods, when collapsed, easily fit inside the bottommost pillar, and the actual lights fit snugly under the bed, on top of the now out-of-sight blood-inscribed pentagram.

It actually didn't look that bad. I worked from home that day, to prevent the building inspectors from brushing the headboard and causing the whole fragile edifice of lies to collapse, but they only glanced at the room through the door, complimented me on my good taste, and asked about the four indentations in the floor of the kitchen. Heh heh. Ahem.

After the building inspectors left, we had about 12 hours to convert the bedroom back into the Satanic Death Pit for our shoot on Saturday. In retrospect, it would have been far easier to convert the Satanic Death Pit into a Naughty Play Dungeon, as the building inspectors of San Francisco are probably used to that sort of thing, but live and learn.  ¶ 2:48 PM 0 Comments

  One Can Dream

...but for now, we'll just have to make do with our bedroom.

All in all, shooting in the bedroom worked out just fine, despite
having to put up with lots of jokes about how easy it must be to get
to the whipped cream while our bed was in the kitchen. We certainly
could have used some extra production space, but for the most part it
wasn't too tough to work in the 14x12 foot room. Use of compact
fluorescent and LED lighting kept us from baking our cast and crew,
and while it did get a little tight, it came together.

That said, this weekend we wrapped principle photography, and so we're
back to sleeping in our studio. Uh, bedroom.

  ¶ 10:54 PM 0 Comments

  On Editing Production schedules never go exactly as planned, but this past weekend Dex and I saw the upside of that chaos. We'd planned on shooting one sequence on Saturday and another two on Sunday, but we ended up getting all three on Saturday. That gave us an entire day off, and though it took us a while to adjust to such a completely alien concept, we managed to get in some serious leisure.

Our digital production process differs from more traditional methods of filmmaking in at least one major way. Usually, you'd film a "master" of an entire sequence, a wide shot that follows the action from start to finish. You'd then film the sequence again from another angle (perhaps a close-up of one of the actors), and repeat the process until you were comfortable that you had every possible combination covered. Then you'd decide what portions of those long shots to use in the editing room.

Instead, Dex and I storyboard the entire thing first, so we know exactly what we want the final product to look like. We plan a few more shots for coverage, but in general we go on set knowing exactly what shoots we need. Editing the footage goes much faster, because you've already decided what shots to use where, and we know exactly where those shots are on the tape due to production logging.

To make a long story short, we already have a final cut of about 80% of the movie. We still may make editing changes for pacing once the missing sequences are added, but we already have a pretty good feel for what went right and what went wrong on this production.

I'll save the full post-mortem for after we've fully wrapped production, but for now I can categorically state that Steadycam is more trouble than it's worth. Ah well, live and learn.  ¶ 4:03 PM 0 Comments

  Smile! You're on Supernatural Camera! Paul's script called for Inspector Hieronymus to use his "fabulous steampunk Polaroid" in our second short film chronicling the adventures of the intrepid occult detective. The camera needed to look like something that the Inspector would use to photograph supernatural activity, and in Paul's mind, I guess, that's "steampunk." The first Hieronymus short featured his "fabulous steampunk flashlight," and given it's brass fittings and such, I'd say it was, indeed, steampunk. (You can see the flashlight -- and the entire short -- here.) I'm pretty familiar with the historic line of Polaroid cameras, from the old Land to the Spectra and the "Go," but none of them were what I'd call "steampunk."

So, one Saturday a few weeks ago, I got together with JT Tepnapa of Star Trek Phase II, In the Closet (In the Closet isn't safe for work!) and Judas' Kiss for a walk through the Mission District of San Francisco to hit some thrift stores, looking for material to work with. We found a bunch of old cameras for cheap, and one awesome object that's a relic from the physical film days of home-movies (which I'm hanging on to for future projects!). Thrift-shopping for props is a great way to spend an afternoon hanging out with a friend.

Once home, I took apart one of the cameras, added some wood inlays, some brass brads, and some leather, but I still wasn't feeling it. It needed some brass fittings. So, I went to our local hardware store and spent more on brass lamp parts than I did on the rest of the camera and drilled, screwed and glued them on. The end result is the contraption you see the Inspector holding in the photo above. All in all I think it worked.

If we keep making these movies, we're going to build quite a collection of steampunk or para-Victorian items.

And that couldn't make me happier.

Labels: props, steampunk

  ¶ 2:56 PM 0 Comments

  Genius at Work, Again

As part of our workflow on Inspector Hieronymus, we do a rough edit of
our shoots as soon as we can to make sure we haven't missed anything
before we strike the sets. I finished the rough cut hours ago (and we
discovered some things we want to get -- not so much that we missed,
but enhancements we hadn't thought of until we saw everything on the
timeline), but Paul, takes things to Eleven by performing a first
pass at color correction and image enhancement.... Here you can see
him at work with Adobe AfterEffects CS4, tweaking the exposure and
color of the good Inspector. This phone snapshot could use some of
that enhancement!  ¶ 11:02 PM 0 Comments